Text handling
Often, when working with images, you’ll need to work with text, too.
Of the programs we’re looking at in this month’s Roundup, Inkscape is the best one for working with text. At all times, text objects remain fully editable and you can carry out tasks such as add shadows and gradient fills, and alter the line style and width. Beyond that, you can convert text into a path to make further alterations to the shape. There’s also a tool that makes it possible for you to constrain text to the bounds of another object, such as a box.
When you edit text in GIMP, it creates a new layer, and that text remains fully editable – a feature we consider essential. Of course, the downside of this arrangement is that you can’t decorate the text using other tools. The overall text facilities are basic but good, and offer the expected selection among the fonts installed on the system and some rudimentary features to constrain the text to a box. In previous years, we had found the text facilities of GIMP to be a bit buggy, but putting the current stable release through its paces, everything seemed to work as expected.
Krita takes a similar approach, although the text is added to a vector layer rather than a bitmap one. There’s a long-standing bug in the program that prevents the successful selection of text font weight in the dialog. The developers are aware of the problem, but it’s taking a long time to fix.
MyPaint doesn’t include text-handling facilities as such. However, it’ll enable you to add a vector layer containing text with a program such as Inkscape. You can then use the ‘Edit layer in external app...’ option to continue editing. It’s a basic but workable arrangement.